Stories of brain cancer, starting with our own

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brain cancer treatment

This post is a guest post by Alexander Moore. Graphic created by Laurel Jackson.

It saddened me deeply to hear that American hero John McCain was diagnosed with Glioblastoma or GBM, the most common and most malignant of brain tumors. It is simply not fair for someone who has already suffered the unimaginable horrors of war and captivity to now have to endure the pain of Brain Cancer. Senator McCain will be 1 of nearly 24,000 people diagnosed with primary brain cancer this year in the U.S. Not a lot in the grand scheme, but for almost 24,000 people and their families, it’s devastating. The median survival is 16 months and the effects of the disease and treatment deeply impact quality of life.

Senator McCain has already had surgery to have as much of the tumor removed as possible, but he will most likely go through a treatment regimen which combines radiation and an oral form of chemotherapy. For most who suffer from GBM, treatment only really prolongs life because the tumor is almost guaranteed to grow back even after chemotherapy and radiation. Through the next few weeks, the McCain family will learn all about Brain Cancer and the devastating effects it has on those who have to endure it, just like another political powerhouse family, the Bidens did a couple years ago.

Former Vice President Biden lost his son Beau to Brain Cancer in 2015, and since then has made it his mission to radically change the way that cancer research and treatments are done with the Cancer Moonshot initiative. The Cancer Moonshot initiative has been a point we can all rally around, and hopefully, these additional efforts will speed new treatments for patients everywhere.

There are big changes happening in cancer research, and there is every reason to hope that discoveries will be made faster than ever before. Initiatives like Cavatica.org, funded in part by Dragon Master Foundation, make cancer research data open to researchers around the world. Additionally, researchers are willing to push their work into new frontiers, like the Children’s Brain Tumor Tissue Consortium (CBTTC) and Pacific Pediatric Neuro Oncology Consortium (PNOC) hospitals who have agreed to share data live during a clinical trial that is set to start later this summer. We are working closely with these initiatives, both through idea sharing and funding. Patient, family and foundation input is being heard more than ever before, and I am optimistic that Senator McCain will be a strong advocate for both himself and other patients facing a similar diagnosis.

I’m confident that Mr. McCain has the fortitude to take this disease on full steam, and everyone at Dragon Master Foundation wishes him well.

Editor’s note:The odds of getting brain cancer is about 1 in 140 for men and 1 in 180 for women. The odds of being elected to Congress are 1 in 600,000. Let’s all hope Senator McCain continues to beat the odds!

Today is the halfway point in the Revlon Love is On Challenge. We have raised over $21,000, which far exceeds any online fundraising we have done for Dragon Master Foundation in the past. It shows that we are growing as a foundation and that people are starting to really understand and support our mission. I really wanted us to be at $50,000 by the end of the day today, though. Hitting $50,000 today would mean that we have a guaranteed pitch meeting with Revlon to promote Cavatica — an open access data platform that will dramatically improve the cancer research process. We have until midnight. I haven’t given up hope.

My heart may be broken, but I don’t want yours to be.

There are literally thousands of people who have the potential to read this message. If each of them donated only $10, we would far exceed our goal. There are many times in this life that we are helpless. We sit and watch as good people die from a disease that seems unstoppable. I’m here to tell you that it is stoppable. We are seeing breakthroughs with precision medicine efforts, but if we want them for everyone we must take action. Precision medicine initiatives are only as good as the data that drives them. You’ve seen the photos. Right now, a family sits with their child knowing there is nothing else to be done. For those of us who have been there, there is nothing we wouldn’t do to keep you from knowing that pain. Wives continue on without their husbands because a nasty beast stole them away right in their prime. Children grow up without mothers because cancer stole them from their family.

This project has the potential to help all of mankind. I don’t expect you to devote your life to it. I know you have jobs and kids and other responsibilities. All I’m asking is that you realize what an amazing opportunity this could be for all of us, and maybe skip that extra meal out this week. Donate two days worth of Starbucks to our cause — TODAY. I promise you we will make the very most out of that donation.

What I wish I knew before my Mom was diagnosed with Glioblastoma Multiforme…

When brain cancer entered my life, I couldn’t have processed or understood at that moment that it was the cancer that keeps on stealing. It stole my Mom’s speech, her movement on the left side, her laugh, her smile, her personality, in short, it took all of her. And then, it came for us.

My brother, David, and I have been close my whole life. I’ve been blessed beyond measure in that respect. We endured much growing up; both of us faced major obstacles that required full family support to survive. It was always a comfort to know that my Mom, Dad and David would be there to face whatever challenge showed up next. I wish I knew how to prepare to for the day when crisis would result in the death of the leader of the pack. At thirty-six, it’s very difficult to think about how to face the rest of my life without my Mom.

My Mom’s fight with Glioblastoma Multiforme (GBM) was short. It began on Valentine’s Day of 2013 and ended on the afternoon of May 6, 2013. In those eighty-two days, she endured a resection, a stroke three days post resection, and three weeks of physical therapy which kept her from any sort of chemo or radiation. Mom’s left side was completely paralyzed thanks to the stroke, chemo, radiation, continued physical therapy and finally home hospice.

I wish I’d understood the health care system better. I wish I’d known that lack of funding, lack of research and no new treatment was the stark reality for those facing GBM. That death from GBM is the rule, not the exception. I wish I’d known GBM is considered “rare,” and that because it’s such a low priority, it’s considered an undesirable disease to study. I wish I’d known all of these things so I could’ve been prepared, planned ahead, advocated more effectively. But I didn’t.

I wish I knew before cancer that this… IS IT! Of course I know we only get one life; I wish I’d recognized earlier the importance of each day. I wish I’d taken more pictures throughout her life, that I’d spent more time with just her when she wasn’t sick. I wish a million things had been different, but I understand they simply are not. Mostly, I wish I knew how much the death of one family member can change the dynamic of the entire family. We aren’t the same. My Mom was the glue. She held everyone together, carried the Band-Aids and tissues in her purse for emergencies. No one tells you that cancer will change everything. Forever.

I wish I knew how just plain ugly cancer could be. There’s an unwritten rule among GBM folks: Do not compare any other cancer to this. When anyone does so, it is hard not to cringe. I’ve stood beside my dear friend while her Mom conquered ovarian cancer multiple times. GBM is nothing like that. My close friends, especially those who came to see my Mom, learned quickly this was a whole other beast. My Mom had the reasoning ability of a child post-stroke. She could say things that were cruel, such as when she told a friend that I pushed her out of her wheelchair and tried to kill her. Oh how that stung! Long gone was my sweet, smart Mama who loved others so very much. Nothing is quite as humbling as cleaning your Mom during a Depends change or feeding her soup and wiping her mouth.

I wish I knew how much others cared before cancer. People came out of the woodwork when they find out my Mom had GBM. They cooked, cleaned, prayed non-stop, gave gifts, and struggled for words that could possibly make my family feel better. My work family responded in a way you read about in books. They donated money in my Mom’s name to ABTA, covered my butt, and prayed non-stop. They took care of my cat, cleaned my apartment, gave me hugs, and listened when I needed to just spill my heart. My friends did all of this as well, but to see my work family just jump in without being asked told me quite clearly how they felt about me.

I wish I knew about post-cancer, post-funeral aftershock. I was ill-prepared for the after effects of cancer. I didn’t understand that my brain was processing all of these emotions for months after my Mom was gone. I continuously lost items, I forgot what I was doing, would find my keys in the freezer. I found myself continuing to panic with every incoming call and text, and sleep was hard to come by for months. Sometime around the five month mark, I started having nightmares. There are still days—over a year later— when I cannot remember what I’m doing or sleep through the night. While less frequent, the nightmares still love to resurface at the first sign of stress.

Lastly, I wish I’d known that all the things that fell apart did so for a reason. I’m not referring to my Mom’s death; her death is something I’ll never understand. It is only now that I begin to recognize that sometimes you have to experience extraordinary pain from loss before you decide to change priorities. My Mom was my biggest cheerleader; her cancer helped me see my life much clearer. She was constantly telling us good things would come from her cancer. I’ve made connections with others fighting GBM, begun working to spread smiles through my charitable project for kids with, Brain Cancer Share Your Shirts, and I’ve strived to make my loved ones my top priority everyday. The more I delve into advocating, the more of those “good things” begin to surface.

Brain cancer has not changed my core values or beliefs. However, some parts of my life have been permanently altered. If you ask me which issues are most important to me at the polls in 2014, you’ll find my answers dramatically shifted from those I would have given a year ago. My first priority is now supporting those politicians, regardless of party, who support brain cancer research. It matters. I wasn’t always a major supporter of brain cancer funding, but then again, I wasn’t always a thirty-six year old living without my Mom courtesy of GBM.

Missing Patricia A. Gauly today, and always.

With Love and Hope,

Kristen Gauly

Editor’s note: If you would like to learn more about what Kristen is doing in her mom’s memory, check out her Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Brain-Cancer-Share-Your-Shirts/160672910806397

This week I had the great pleasure of speaking with Dr. Peter Adamson, Group Chair of the Children’s Oncology Group (COG). For those of you unfamiliar with COG, more than 90% of children and adolescents diagnosed with cancer each year in the United States are cared for at Children’s Oncology Group member institutions. Their goal is to cure all children and adolescents with cancer, reduce the short and long-term complications of cancer treatments, and determine the causes and find ways to prevent childhood cancer. That matches our mission pretty well, so I was excited to learn where we might be able to collaborate.

COG is currently focused on collecting biospecimens and clinical data. In layman’s terms, they are collecting cancer specimens (tissue, blood, etc) as well ad information on the child’s diagnosis, treatment and outcome. They have collected a massive amount of data over the past 50 years. They have well over a million biospecimens! More than 350,000 patients have shared data with them. They have biorepositories and databases in different parts of the country and work with over 220 hospitals in the US & Canada.

I am very impressed by what they have accomplished, but ultimately, I believe that the infrastructure we are building can improve the work they are doing. Their focus is collecting the specimens and data. Our focus is taking those specimens and data and making them a perpetual resource backed by robust computational power to allow them to collaborate with other researchers and also analyze and visualize the data in new ways.

To give you some idea of the scale of the data, let’s look at the numbers. There are approximately 14,000 children a year diagnosed with cancer in the US. Collecting a biospecimen would cost somewhere in the range of $1,000. (The NIH currently values that at around $500, but the actual institutional cost is thought to be much higher, thus my $1,000 figure.) So just to collect the biospecimens for those patients, you are looking at $140,000 per year. However, that is just scratching the surface of what needs to be done. Those specimens have to be stored (visualize giant freezers with robots to access the individual samples), categorized, and matched with corresponding clinical records.

Traditionally, most hospitals and foundations have been unwilling and/or unable to invest in the infrastructure that it would take to compile this amount of data. COG demonstrated real vision by collecting this data and they have been able to use it to forward science. Dragon Master Foundation believes that additional computational power, or “big data” analytics, will help them find the cures they seek even faster.

Dr. Adamson said he felt Dragon Master Foundation is taking “a sophisticated look at the challenge.” We know that building this type of computational infrastructure will be expensive, but we also know that it will exponentially decrease the amount of time it takes for researchers to collect and query data. Faster answers to their questions means faster cures for us.

There is no doubt in my mind that we are building a resource that will improve cancer research. It ultimately will help cancer researchers throughout the US, and probably throughout the world. It will make the work they have been doing for years more relevant.

To learn more about Dragon Master Foundation, please visit http://www.dragonmasterfoundation.org. To learn more about the Children’s Oncology Group, please visit projecteverychild.org or childrensoncologygroup.org .

We get a lot of questions about Dragon Master Foundation, and whenever I have the chance to talk to someone about it, the response is amazing. They always end up saying “Wow, that’s such a big deal!” People are so generous with their support once they understand the project. The problem is, a lot of people don’t understand what we are doing and why it is needed. So I thought I’d take a moment to explain a little bit about what makes this project so special.

When David was sick, we were inside hospitals for days at a time watching people do their jobs. Technology is everywhere – from the patient bedside to databases in some unseen corner of the building. However, all of that technology seems to be locked inside each institution, with very little ability to share information from one hospital to the next.

It is like being a horse with blinders on. You can only see a small part what’s really out there. You get a myopic view of the world. Unfortunately, that is the world most cancer doctors and researchers face. They long for more information, but it is largely out of their reach.

You may be thinking, “But what about the internet? Can’t they just send their information back and forth?” The short answer is no. Between HIPAA, different technology formats, and the sheer size of data, even the most collaborative hospitals have trouble sharing all the information researchers want to access. Collaboration would mean that a database would quickly need to warehouse petabytes of of information – a task that has only been tackled by the likes of the NSA or Google in the past.

It is an overwhelming task, to be sure, but for the first time in history, it is possible. It is possible to house genetic information and clinical data in one place so that researchers can really see the “big picture” of a patient’s health and furthermore, they can compare that patient to other patients. They can start to see why a drug works for one patient and not another. They can start to make sense out of things that are seemingly random.

It will be four years this September since we were dropped into this cancer world. I’m not a doctor or a researcher, but I’ve talked to as many as I could over that time, and every one of them has said a database like this would be an asset to them. EVERY ONE OF THEM.

And yet, we continue to spend money on tiny projects that help a single researcher or a single hospital. Please don’t misunderstand. Every researcher needs funding. Every hospital needs more help. But this is a situation of not being able to see the forrest for the trees. We need to build an infrastructure for the research data if we ever hope to move at a pace that is faster than cancer.

The good news is, we have made amazing progress. We have joined forces with the Children’s Brain Tumor Tissue Consortium, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, Chicago’s Lurie Children’s Hospital, and Children’s Hospital of Seattle to take the database they are working on and grow it to a scale that can help pediatric and adult patients. The data is already being collected, which is a great and wonderful thing. However, it means that we are already at a place where we need vast amounts of funding in order to continue to grow.

I wake up every morning more sure that this database will change the way they do medical research. I have hope that people will begin to understand the vision that that this database represents, and that they will focus on helping us build it. You ABSOLUTELY CAN make a HUGE difference in the fight against cancer. Please share the mission of Dragon Master Foundation. Like us on Facebook ( http://www.facebook.com/DragonMasterFoundation ). Follow us on Twitter (@dragonmasterfdn and/or @amandahaddock ). Host a grass-roots fundraising event. Something as simple as dining out at a local restaurant that will donate proceeds can be a huge help with both raising money and raising awareness. Cancer is a beast that is taking lives. You can be a dragon master. Please join us today!

What I wish I had known before my husband was diagnosed with brain cancer.

My husband, John, was diagnosed with a grade 4 Glioblastoma Multiforme brain tumor in May of 2011. He was 57 years old and otherwise in perfect health. The only symptom he had was a grand mal seizure, which led to a trip to the ER, an MRI, a biopsy, and the devastating news that his chances of surviving more than 5 years were about 5%.

The day of John’s seizure was the 25th anniversary of the very day we met. John’s cousin, Patty, has been a good friend of mine since high school, and she introduced us, telling me “You need to meet my cousin, John. He has a nice car.” Little did I know her idea of a nice car was a Chevy with manual windows and no air conditioning. Knowing her as I do, I surmised the reason she thought the car was nice was because it was practical, affordable and paid for! She knew I needed stability in my life, and John was nothing if not stable and responsible.

On May 25, 2011, the day of John’s seizure, it was unusually warm and windy. The weather man was predicting severe storms. John and I went out on our deck after dinner and found a huge branch from a tree had been blown into our yard and was stuck perpendicular in the ground. John said “That’s an omen.” Little did we know. Within the next hour, we were in an ambulance on our way to the hospital.

John’s battle with GBM was short and brutal. He had the standard radiation and chemotherapy. We also sought out clinical trials at Duke University’s Preston Robert Tisch Brain Cancer Center, which is one of the top brain cancer treatment centers in the country, and where Ted Kennedy sought treatment for the same type of tumor. Unfortunately, John didn’t qualify for a clinical trial, so we were sent home to try Avastin. Avastin has worked well for some brain cancer patients in improving quality of life and in some cases extending life, but for John it only raised his blood pressure to dangerous levels. After two treatments that resulted in no reduction of the size of the tumor, the medical oncologist asked John if he’d like to “take a break” from all treatment. He knew exactly what she was asking and told her “Yes, I’m at the end of the road.” It broke my heart to hear him say that, but I knew it was his decision. I feel blessed that he was able to make the decision himself. Many brain cancer patients lose the cognitive ability to make decisions about their treatment, but because of the location of John’s tumor (in the occipital lobe), he retained most of his awareness and personality until very near the end. I’m glad I never had to make the difficult decision to tell the doctors to stop treatment, as many family members do.

John survived for 10 months after he was diagnosed, and passed away peacefully in our home on March 31, 2012. Ironically, the only person who was with us when he left this earthly plane was his cousin and my dear friend, Patty. The very person who introduced us. She was with us for our first hello and for our last goodbye.

Like many others who have endured the tragedy of GBM, I wish I had known how strong I really am. When you’re faced with such a horrific disease in someone you love, you know that you will do whatever it takes to help them, comfort them, and ultimately to make their transition to the next world as easy and peaceful as possible. If I had known the strength I would have I may not have been so afraid.

I wish I had known the depth of my husband’s love for me. I always knew he loved me – I never doubted it. But when he was close to death he said things and did things that told me that, even though his brain was being eroded daily by this terrible tumor, our love was what he knew for sure. Once, about three days before he passed, he asked me for a pen and paper. He said, “Maybe it would help if I write this down.” I didn’t know what he wanted to write or what it would help, but he wrote “Julie” – the name he called me, and that was all.

There is no more devastating cancer than cancer of the brain. Because of the very nature of brain tissue, cancer cells quickly spread throughout it, and treatment in most cases is only able to slow the progression of the disease. Treatment can also severely impact quality of life, forcing patients and families to make horribly difficult decisions about what treatment to take and how long to continue it. Recent research into the genetic makeup of individual tumors is showing some progress, mostly by helping doctors determine what treatment will most effectively slow down the beast, and therefore spare patients unnecessary pain and suffering. But there still is no known cause and very few survivors. More needs to be done to understand what causes brain cancer and how to treat it. I hope that someday there will be just as much awareness of the need for research into brain cancer treatment as there is for breast cancer, prostate cancer and the other more common forms of this terrible disease. Brain cancer is not as common as breast cancer or prostate cancer, but it is the most deadly of cancers.

The most important lesson I learned from the whole experience of caring for my husband during this journey is that love is really all that matters. When everything else is stripped away, love is what remains. It sounds trite, and people say it all the time, but I never really knew it in my soul until I felt the depth of the love I had for him, which made caring for him a privilege instead of an obligation. Until I saw that even though his brain was damaged so badly that he no longer knew if it was day or night, or how to use a fork, or where he was in the house, he knew me. He loved me, and he knew I loved him. For that I thank God. Knowing the true power of love has given me a new and deeper appreciation of all of the people in my life whom I love and love me. It’s helped me to understand what is really important.